A Real Honey Of A Ham

In Search Of The Perfect Glazed Ham: It Takes Sugar And Spice And A Blow Torch

March 23, 1989|By Pat Dailey.

To many minds, ham is to Easter what turkey is to Thanksgiving, a sine qua non that defines the feast if not the holiday.

Recently, traditional hams, etched with a crisscross pattern in the uppermost layer of fat and studded with a careful arrangement of whole cloves, have taken a back seat to another style of hams: those that glisten under a crackly coat of sugar, honey and spice.

They have been the darlings of many ham-eating folks, and now are becoming the sight that best signifies the celebratory Easter feast.

These hams go by many names, all of them some juxtaposition of the words honey and ham, made all the more enticing by the addition of lip-smacking adjectives.

Because of the popularity of these Easter beauties, the Food Guide embarked on a mission. Our goal: duplicate for the home cook these honey-glazed hams-the sweet, golden glaze and the perfect spiral slicing.

The reasoning seemed sound enough. After all, shouldn`t a home version save money and end up tasting just as good, if not better, than a ham bought from a store already glazed?

We sampled many of the hams on the market, musing over their merits, and then embarked on the quest. What we found along the way came as a bit of a surprise.

Challenge of taste

The first challenge was to find out what made the sweetly spiced glaze taste so good. This, of course, is a secret, rigorously guarded by the companies who have put these hams on the map. It seemed reasonable to assume that with honey so prominent in the name of these hams, they would have more than just a bit of honey.

Trouble was, any time we added more than a little drop, the glaze tasted quite unlike the one we were aiming to mimic. Bite after bite of the original seemed to suggest that honey wasn`t the big league player here. So if not honey, then what was it?

Our biggest and best clue came by accident. Gilbert Thompson, manager of Neuske`s, a Wisconsin maker of honey-glazed hams, was describing how the glaze was hand rubbed onto the hams, then cooked with a flame thrower.

A flame thrower-isn`t that something like a propane torch? And there was our answer. The glaze on these hams is mostly sugar that has been melted by a direct flame so it caramelizes. On the home front, this means using a propane torch to melt the sugar.

Although it was turning out to be more than we bargained for, the fact that duplicating the ham required a propane torch did not stand in our way. We were undaunted and stood firm in our resolve to see our mission through to the end. After all, Julia Child sang the praises of torches on television, so at least it wasn`t unheard of to use this rather unusual piece of hardware for culinary purposes. Suffice it to say, we could live with the torch.

Market next stop

The next stop was the market, where, once again, we had our eyes opened. An enticing array of hams awaited us and we knew there`d be no problem finding one that was as good as those used by commercial manufacturers for their honey-baked hams.

We looked for a lean ham that had a subtle undertone of hickory smoke, wasn`t too salty and didn`t contain a lot of water. This was an easy order to fill.

But once we got out the calculators, it was clear that our at-home rendition was not going to save much money, not even enough to buy a good sized chocolate Easter egg. Most whole, bone-in hams hover right around $4 a pound. Those bathed in a honey glaze and sliced cost only 10 to 20 cents a pound more.

Finally, we looked right in the face of defeat when we attempted to slice the ham at home. Slicing a ham with the bone in is definitely a challenge, made all the more difficult by a bone that seems to run every which way through the ham. It`s not just one bone that stands in the way, but a series of several, each one interrupting any attempt to cut an even slice.

Spiral slicing, one of the hallmarks of the honey hams, is done on a machine that is like a lathe. Two pins secure the ham in place, one at the top, another at the bottom. The apparatus holding the ham rotates while a slicer penetrates the ham, all the way through to the bone. So sliced, the ham resembles its original shape. In fact, looking at it, you`d never guess that it had been sliced at all. However, just a gentle tug yields slice after picture-perfect-slice of ham. Duplicating the process at home would have been a coup, a victory that would have validated our mission.

Although we raided the tool shop for the glaze, we weren`t going to go so far as to suggest a lathe for slicing the ham. Instead, we entertained thoughts of using a rotisserie and an electric carving knife. As the ham slowly turned around, the knife would cut the ham much like the spiral-sliced hams.

This is where we were stopped in our tracks. Put into action, such a contraption would do little more than etch a spiralled line through the top layer of fat, a far cry from those perfect slices we were seeking.